Department of Anthropology

College of Social Sciences

Qualitative Methods

The Good the Bad and the Ugly

To prepare to work with Atlas/ti (one of the most popular and most powerful qualitative
data analysis software packages) review the following where I and others discuss some
of the benefits and pitfalls of qualitative data analysis software.

It provides a great general overview of qualitative software. Further (optional) reading could include:

If you visit any of the following, your goal would be to better familiarize yourself
with the notion of coding in qualitative research and the idea of “grounded theory”.[If
the links don't work, copy and past them into your browser]

4. In preparation for a presentation on this subject, it is helpful to bring any ethnographic
notes you may have. With your own notes, you can download them into the free version
of Atlas/ti and do some coding activities.

NOTE: To facilitate easy coding, it is easiest if you use block paragraphing in your
note taking but this is not a requirement.

That is, rather than indenting, skip a line to start a new paragraph (like I did here).